C-PTSD: Self-care Is the Beginning of Healing
When was the last time you listened to yourself breathing?
It is a difficult task for me, someone who suffers from C-PTSD.
When people in your life who are supposed to care for you abuse you, treat you as if you are not worthy of care, it is challenging to correct this perception, even within yourself.
But I am finding as trauma, a recurring tidal wave, threatens to drown me, that for C-PTSD, self-care is the beginning of healing. It is the foundation for recovery.
After agitation and frenzy, I have lain in the fetal position in a state of freeze. This is my lowest, when I am wiped out from flight or fight.
My recovery is a child learning to walk. I toddle, I creep, I shuffle until I regain ground.
I attend to my breathing. I comfort my gut who is voicing her distress audibly.
Poetry. Music. Dishes cleaned. Nails trimmed. Face washed.
It can be scary, for anyone, but particularly PTSD sufferers, to stop listening to the world, to the voices of abusers that can’t be entirely banished from your head, to the internalized voices that drive you to do things you don’t want to do, or be someone you don’t want to be.
Like anything else, listening to yourself and learning to heed your own impulses and needs gets easier with practice.
You can’t control the world or achieve justice or retribution.
But you can give yourself the care you have been longing to receive, sadly absent but now marvelously present.
A holiday in your name that can happen any day of week.
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